I’m lifting this quote direct from Foe’s blog: Phillip Pullman on play and creativity [my emboldening]:
"…when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic,
childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful,
and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the
most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we
won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before
us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we
make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty,
we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it,
and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time.
Everything else is proofreading."
Fantastic.
» The Guardian: Common sense has much to learn from moonshine
Petafloptimism 
Such a shame that the prevailing corporate culture in the western world seems determined to drive it out of our organisations then!
Along similar lines from: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1396578,00.html
about ‘the headmaster who banned homework’
‘Traditional homework is boring, irrelevant and all too often the source of family conflict,’ he says, crossing his legs at the ankles and propelling himself forward by jutting out his knees in opposite directions like a camping stool. ‘I have spent the last four years re-engineering our school’s curriculum for the 21st century and one thing I have become very much aware of is that homework is a 20th-century concept whose time has long gone.
‘Pupils should not be sponging ideas off their teachers: they should be taught to have their own ideas’.
…
‘The no-homework plan is Hazlewood’s latest step in this project, seeing his Year Seven pupils (11- and 12-year-olds) encouraged to think around long-term projects at home instead of being asked to complete set tasks.’
Well I know that the homework I received when I was in school was done in my next class, at lunch, or in the morning of the next day.